KOIN Mining: Frequently Asked Questions

in Koinos3 years ago

Hello again Hivers, I’m Andrew Levine, the CEO of OpenOrchard, the company behind the Koinos blockchain. As many of you probably know by now, this past Tuesday the KOIN token was launched on Ethereum which anyone can now mine using the CPU in their computer. And boy have people been mining!

KOIN mining has begun.jpg

We are really excited about the level of interest there is in KOIN. All of this interest, this early in the process, is a great sign that Koinos will be set up to succeed and help us advance our mission to give everyone ownership and control over their digital selves.

We also got a ton of feedback on how we could improve the miner which enabled us to rapidly release an update that resolved the majority of issues people were experiencing. We also appreciate all of the amazing people interacting in our discord server, helping one another optimize their miners, and troubleshoot any issues they are having. These early KOIN adopters will be the core community members who will help us dramatically reduce the barriers to blockchain adoption.

We are also fielding a lot of the same questions repeatedly so I wanted to provide a single place where people can get answers to these “Frequently Asked Questions,” or point those who are looking for answers.

FAQ

What is “Proof Frequency?”

The key to understanding the proof frequency is that this number isn’t a “real” setting in the miner. Instead what you are modifying is the difficulty of the problem your miner is trying to solve. Harder problems take longer to solve, but the time it takes to solve them is just a guesstimation. The miner might solve the problem right away, or take an unusually long time. It will only rarely take exactly the time you expect it to take.

Why Set a Low Frequency?

In the case of PoW KOIN mining, increased difficulty results in a higher potential KOIN reward. But again, there is randomness here too. The KOIN reward might be large, but it might also be small. So a lower number (e.g. 1 per day or 2 per day) is likely to win you larger KOIN rewards. But an added benefit is that it minimizes your Ethereum fees as well.

Why Set a High Frequency?

Low frequency proofs (i.e. high difficulty) give you bigger potential rewards, so why would you increase the frequency especially considering it will result in higher Ethereum fees? One way to think about mining is like it’s a lottery (except it has slightly better odds ;) ). If you buy enough tickets, you can expect to win an approximate number of times. But you know that your odds of winning with any single ticket is very low. So what do you do? You increase the number of tickets you buy. You make sure that you’re playing the game enough times so that over the long run you receive the rewards that the probabilities say you should.

What Happens if I Shut Down the Miner?

Note that setting a higher frequency doesn’t help you beat someone else to the punch. Your computer is solving hundreds of thousands (or millions) of “losing” hashes every second that it is throwing in the trash, just as you would a losing lottery ticket. It is not saving those hashes, it is searching for one “winning” hash and when it finds that hash it immediately submits a proof to the Ethereum network. This is why it doesn’t matter if your computer loses access to the internet or you just turn off the miner for a moment. You don’t “lose” anything other than the opportunity costs associated with the time that could have been spent mining.

Why Mine?

It’s important to remember that our mission is to give everyone ownership and control over their digital selves. The foundational product we are releasing to serve that mission is the Koinos mainnet and the purpose of this mining phase is to decentralize the token distribution and ensure that when it launches, the Koinos mainnet is as decentralized as any blockchain out there, if not more!

KOIN will be the cryptocurrency that powers a decentralized computer built from the ground up to enable developers to offer delightful user experiences while protecting the user’s digital information through blockchain integration. The purpose of this phase is to get KOIN into the hands of developers and users who want be able to use the types of applications that Koinos is capable of powering.

Download the miner
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CLI Miner

Official OpenOrchard Miner: https://github.com/open-orchard/koinos-miner
My "Enhanced" Version: https://github.com/therealwolf42/koinos-miner

Awesome! Thanks for contributing!

A note for those running the GUI on Windows, it will hog all your CPU power because its processes are set to Normal priority. This will slow down your other computer activities, even moving the mouse! The solution is to set the priority to Low.

A few of ways to do it:

  • Task Manager
    Oening the Task Manager, go to the Details tab, find the process names "Koinos Miner.exe" and "koinos_miner.exe", then right-click on each of them, Set priority, Low.
  • PowerShell
    You can easily do that with a PowerShell prompt with these two commands:
Get-WmiObject Win32_process -filter 'name = "koinos_miner.exe"' | foreach-object { $_.SetPriority(64) }
Get-WmiObject Win32_process -filter 'name = "koinos miner.exe"' | foreach-object { $_.SetPriority(64) }

SetPriority(64) means Low.

  • In command prompt (or batch file)
wmic process where name="koinos miner.exe" CALL setpriority 64
wmic process where name="koinos_miner.exe" CALL setpriority 64

More on changing priority here https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/89548-set-cpu-process-priority-applications-windows-10-a.html

if you set the priority to low how much does it impact the hash rate, does it decrease it a lot?

Doesn't impact at all. In fact, I'm using a couple less cores on my linux machines (I like to keep some cores free for other things) and surprisingly the hash rate remains roughly the same.

Thanks for the reply.

If I try running a browser with the miner on win 7 hash rate drops off a by probably 25% but at a max, I'm only getting something like 1.7 MH/s anyway.

Setting the priority to low didn't help speed up other processes for me so I disabled one of the cores and it helped.

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Looks like you have an old CPU, 1.7MH/s with 4 cores is pretty low, maybe that's why it's rushing that much. I have my Windows on an i5-9400F and it's on average around 6MH/s with all 6 cores (Low priority too).

Yep you're right, my laptop is old enough with i5-5200U processor. Probably better to buy koin than mine for me anyway

Yes I think it's the best solution, there are some huge miners scooping most of the coins, hard to compete with them when we're doing a few MH/s while they're doing GH/s!

I've noticed in Windows that reduces it by about 50%

It depends, if you have other processes using a lot of CPU then yes the hashrate will decrease. But if you're not doing heavy activities, your cores should all be at 100% even with low priority.

Great suggestion. Thanks for helping out

Thanks for the reminders!

Hey, I think you overcomplicated this whole thing with the frequency approach.

If this is true:

Your computer is solving hundreds of thousands (or millions) of “losing” hashes every second that it is throwing in the trash, just as you would a losing lottery ticket. It is not saving those hashes, it is searching for one “winning” hash and when it finds that hash it immediately submits a proof to the Ethereum network.

Then your miner software is not a miner.

It's a slot machine!

And the process is not mining (accumulating proof over time) but plain and simple

Gambling

Am I right? I thing I am.

So, what frequency gives you the 50/50 chance?

It's a interesting point you're raised here.

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I hope we'll get an answer :)

As it is evolving, the project has already completely lost credibility... have you read on the discord channel?

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Yes, this is great. Love being able to mine just with my CPU's - Just started today and I've hit three times already. Very minimal impact on what I'm doing as well. May just setup an older PC to mine for now.

Nice! I think that this is an under appreciated option for people. You don't have to mine a ton today, you can mine a little bit over the next 6 months. It will add up!

The interest level is high, the miners are easy to use.

It's really been an interesting and educational experience so far.

Congratulations, even the "Help videos" for setting up the mining are easy to follow and professional looking! Well done so far!

Thanks. Ron did the help video AND the GUI miner design! And logos! Crazy, right?!

Well it's all looking well done!

Using proof of work mining on Ethereum for the distribution goes against your goal of being the most decentralized blockchain.

Only a very small group of people will

a) know about KOIN in this 180-day period
b) have access to several hundred dollars worth of ETH for the fees
c) the ability to run a miner

It's basically the STEEM distribution but with the added constraint of needing to pay ETH as well. A simple ICO would have been more inclusive and much less wasteful (how many tons of CO2 will be put up in the atmosphere during this 180 day period?).

Most of this distribution will go to already established miners with CPU farms, just look at this address which is doing something like 4000 MH/s. Either they are running with $100,000s worth of equipment or they have found a way to run the algorithm on GPUs.

If you are thinking about participating, unless you have a really beefy computer or are willing to mine for long periods at a time (ie with a low "proof frequency") you will be better off just buying tokens for the ETH you would have spent on transaction fees anyways.

Don't get me wrong I'm rooting for koinos and think the vision is great. I will probably mine a bit as well but I'm disappointed with this distribution, I think it could have been done so much better...

why some of us keep getting error messages? The last one for me was: "there was a problem retrieving KOIN balance"

Have you downloaded the updated version of the miner? V1.0.1.?

Yes, less problems but, at the end, same error messages. Running on LINUX btw

It was the goldmine for the first few days! Now I'm lucky to get a few KOIN every once in a while. Anyway - thank you for the opportunity. 6 months is a long period - anything can happen!

So cool. One question, will there be Koin social?

Is @vandeberg still doing any Hive development, or has he eschewed that for the sake of OpenOrchard/Koinos?

No members of the OpenOrchard team have worked on either the Steem or Hive blockchains since we resigned from Steemit.

This clears up most of my questions, thanks a lot :)

Anyone else getting a warning from Windows Defender on the GUI miner?

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I can't get it to work so many errors! lol no idea where to report it.

Thanks for the details of the FAQ. That really helps. I have issues at the moment installing the miner in my PCs. Virtually, I have errors when the download is completed. What are the PC/OS specs for efficient installation and operation of KOIN Miner?

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Could we get the Ethereum address for Uniswap here please?